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My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

goodcheapandfast.com

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Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#51

Post by busterarm »

nordic-nomad wrote: post #25

Seems like he has a couple of flag words "cheap and fast" in his URL that others have used in the past as indicators of spam domains, at least I've seen that for email. Even good isn't great to use. And looking at the page naming conventions that carries all the way through. A broad brush penalty to over generalized key words indicative of spam, and shopping site type directories would definitely account for this thi…

Also his website is just affiliate link garbage.

I looked through like 12 categories where I consider myself very familiar with the market for what's available and the product recommendations are poor. At best. Half of the recommendations look like your standard rebadged Alibaba crap peddled on Amazon with all the fake reviews that follow.

I guess the name of the site is a tacit admission that probably the products are not good, but this page is content that's designed to match for certain search terms and not something that's organically good content.

I'm fine with Google ranking this content straight to zero.

Edit: The author is a nice guy and a decent writer. Emotionally, I want to feel for him. But not for content like this.

You can have all of the best intentions and still contribute negative value to the world.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#52

Post by type0 »

mullingitover wrote: post #41
zaroth wrote: post #16

Google is doing a terrible job at it’s core responsibility. I look forward to watching the company falter over the coming decade. Switching costs for a search engine are pretty damn low. And yet their search product is littered with crap and exploits users like only a monopolist would. Ideally they’ll continue burning goodwill by doing things like adding some fact-checking or censorship “features” into Gmail, delisti…

> Switching costs for a search engine are pretty damn low. Are they, though? I seem to recall conversations here where some larger sites were only allowing googlebot to crawl their site in robots.txt rules. Their thinking was that the vast majority of traffic is coming from google, and it wasn't worth it to have multiple also-ran search engines crawling their site frequently. There's a case to be made that search eng…

> Their thinking was that the vast majority of traffic is coming from google, and it wasn't worth it to have multiple also-ran search engines crawling their site frequently. There's a case to be made that search engines are actually a natural monopoly.

The other case to be made that people doing this sort of decisions should loose their jobs.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#53

Post by meibo »

jjcon wrote: post #30
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #8

I’ve had similar experiences with other google products: My mom forgot her gmail password and no longer had the same mobile number for a reset, the secondary reset option was set to my email but would not send a reset despite this. We had a live session via thunderbird but there were no channels of support. Luckily we were able to register her old mobile number to achieve a password reset, thanks to a helpful phone p…

> My mom forgot her gmail password and no longer had the same mobile number for a reset, the secondary reset option was set to my email but would not send a reset despite this. I’m in a similar position except I know my password. Google decided for whatever reason that my location was too different and now requires that I verify via a phone number I no longer have. I have access to the recovery email and even get ‘su…

They ask you regularly if the data is still up to date and have disclaimers about situations like this when you register the phone number as an actual authentication factor.

Not saying that this isn't at least partly on Google, they should have responsive customer service that can verify accounts - but you could have easily prevented that by being less lazy with keeping your data up to date. Security and account recovery is the one thing you shouldn't cheap out on.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#54

Post by grecy »

jjcon wrote: post #30
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #8

I’ve had similar experiences with other google products: My mom forgot her gmail password and no longer had the same mobile number for a reset, the secondary reset option was set to my email but would not send a reset despite this. We had a live session via thunderbird but there were no channels of support. Luckily we were able to register her old mobile number to achieve a password reset, thanks to a helpful phone p…

> My mom forgot her gmail password and no longer had the same mobile number for a reset, the secondary reset option was set to my email but would not send a reset despite this. I’m in a similar position except I know my password. Google decided for whatever reason that my location was too different and now requires that I verify via a phone number I no longer have. I have access to the recovery email and even get ‘su…

Yikes. I've logged into my gmail account from 55 different countries, and I've never had a problem. Some of those countries must have set some flags - Nigeria, Sudan, Mali, Rep. Congo, Bolivia, El Salvador.

Maybe I'm on thin ice..

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#55

Post by ma2rten »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #12
ma2rten wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that even work? Search and search ads are one product.

The company that makes the search engine and the company that sells the ads to the advertiser can be different companies, in the same way that you can put Ad Words on your website and they'll show ads based on the content of the site even though you aren't Google.

So assuming the company is splits into Google and AdWords, would Google be forced to work with AdWords or are they allowed to use different providers? Are they allowed to create their own competitor to AdWords? Which problem is this solving?

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#56

Post by kenniskrag »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #8

I’ve had similar experiences with other google products: My mom forgot her gmail password and no longer had the same mobile number for a reset, the secondary reset option was set to my email but would not send a reset despite this. We had a live session via thunderbird but there were no channels of support. Luckily we were able to register her old mobile number to achieve a password reset, thanks to a helpful phone p…

can't you just disable ssl and sniff the password via wireshark?

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#57

Post by bcrl »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #33
remram wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search is not making profit and only exists to show ads.

...isn't showing ads what makes it profitable? Edit: Oh, I see where you're coming from in light of the parent. Well, Google could place ads inside their product without actually running an ad network—that is in fact what most websites on the internet do. This wouldn't necessarily make sense at Google's scale though, so I don't think that's what GP meant. Rather, Google shouldn't be able to own most of the ad network…

Ad networks were separate years ago! Strangely enough they were acquired. Google bought AdSense and Sprinks in 2003, dMark Broadcasting in 2006, AdScape and DoubleClick in 2007, AdMob in 2009, Invite Media in 2010, mDialog in 2014, Red Hot Labs in 2015... I'm sure there are more.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#58

Post by zaroth »

mullingitover wrote: post #41
zaroth wrote: post #16

Google is doing a terrible job at it’s core responsibility. I look forward to watching the company falter over the coming decade. Switching costs for a search engine are pretty damn low. And yet their search product is littered with crap and exploits users like only a monopolist would. Ideally they’ll continue burning goodwill by doing things like adding some fact-checking or censorship “features” into Gmail, delisti…

> Switching costs for a search engine are pretty damn low. Are they, though? I seem to recall conversations here where some larger sites were only allowing googlebot to crawl their site in robots.txt rules. Their thinking was that the vast majority of traffic is coming from google, and it wasn't worth it to have multiple also-ran search engines crawling their site frequently. There's a case to be made that search eng…

I meant end-user switching costs, but you raise good points.

Barrier to entry and startup costs to a competitor have never been lower. I believe recent court wins make “unauthorized” scraping more openly available, and anti-trust regulations should look at allowing competitors to ignore a Google-only robots.txt as long as reasonable throttling is enforced.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#59

Post by KMag »

ma2rten wrote: post #55
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company that makes the search engine and the company that sells the ads to the advertiser can be different companies, in the same way that you can put Ad Words on your website and they'll show ads based on the content of the site even though you aren't Google.

So assuming the company is splits into Google and AdWords, would Google be forced to work with AdWords or are they allowed to use different providers? Are they allowed to create their own competitor to AdWords? Which problem is this solving?

Yes, they'd be allowed to use other ad providers, and hopefully it would be illegal to penalize them for constantly running some multi-armed-bandit trials across multiple ad providers.

Re: My Google Traffic Has Fallen to Zero

#60

Post by cagenut »

Seemingly random and dramatic swings in who wins and loses the SEO game is an awful lot of how Google (helped) kill the newspaper industry. This guy is living through one example, but they all tried to live through a dozen, always scrambling to recover from the sudden loss in order to not suddenly need to lay off (more) ppl.

I don't think it was any scheme or malice, far more like Lenny petting the rabbit, but the rabbit got very dead.

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